BAFTA Winner Boong Addresses Migration, Divisions, And Outsider Status
The Manipuri film Boong opens with an act of mischief. The character of Brojendro, also known as Boong (Gugun Kipgen) in the movie, and his friend Raju (Sanamatum Angom), alter the name of their school from Homochandra Boys School to ‘Homo Boys School’ using a catapult (locally known as gulel), a recurring and poignant personal tool that belongs to Boong (Brojendro) in the film. Mandakini (Bala Hijam), raising a scampish young lad, Boong, all by herself, sells handlooms and awaits her husband, Joy Kumar Singh (Hamom Sadananda), owner of ‘The Best Burma Teak Furniture’.
The film Boong won the Best Children’s & Family Film at the 79th British Academy Film Awards, becoming the first Indian film to win a BAFTA, alongside its world premiere at the Discovery section of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Writer and director Lakshmipriya Devi situates this tender story in the socio-cultural landscape of Manipur, distant to many Indians, building a textured fabric of geography, language, people, and culture, offering a representation that resists the homogenising gaze often found in mainstream media.
Devi’s ethnographic sensibility puts discrimination as a reminder for the ‘Indian audience’ to change or expect the same. The cross-border community in the film is a door to access the widespread communities divided by the borders of the nations. It has a well-defined three-act screenplay structure, keeping the audience engaged from the beginning to the end, with visual foreshadowing from the very beginning. It has an inciting incident, a rising action, and an emotional denouement. The film is written masterfully with motifs as expositions. These expositions are a catapult: the song Like A Virgin by Madonna, Madonna’s poster, and the pink saree that Mandakini never sells, which are later used either as a catalyst in the story or when something changes something within the character.
Migration, Belonging, and Outsider Status
Boong, who misses his father, wants to gift his mother the return of his father, who has been missing since he was 2-3 years old and moved to Burma (now Myanmar). Mandakini, along with Boong, waits for her husband; however, the truth of her silence and resilience is what turns out to be an emotional climax. Raju, who is a fourth-generation member of a business family that migrated to Manipur, and his father, Sudhir Agarwal (Vikram Kochhar), are dealing with discrimination when they believe that they are loyal Manipuris and are also becoming constant supporters of Boong and his mother.
Devi’s ethnographic sensibility puts discrimination as a reminder for the ‘Indian audience’ to change or expect the same. The cross-border community in the film is a door to access the widespread communities divided by the borders of the nations.
The second act of the screenplay, when the film sets the mood and tone, opens a box full of surprises. Mandakini faces taunts for still waiting for her husband, or family members shaming her for giggling with Sudhir, ‘an outsider’. The village also tries to prove that her husband has died by bringing a fake certificate and arranges a funeral prayer. A cinematic scene where everyone is mourning, and Mandakini enters the frame in a pink saree (foreshadowed in the beginning when she refuses to sell the same saree and decides to wear it when her husband returns) with Boong dressed too. She asks the family to “mourn for themselves” (you might feel proud of Mandakini) and later meets with an accident while returning on her scooter with Boong. In between all this, Boong & Raju shift from Homochandra Boys School to an English medium school and face discrimination for their English, becoming friends with Julian (Nemetia Ngangbam), whom they hated at first.
The movie moves forward with Boong finally deciding to elope to find his father and bring him home, to which Raju agrees to join him. They take their classmate Juliana, who helps them to reach Moreh, a town at the India-Myanmar border, where they show a photo of Boong’s father to locals and ask whether they have seen him or not. It is a striking visual that, as a viewer, takes me to political and emotional images of Kashmiri Muslims holding their husbands, sons, or fathers’ photographs who have gone missing, addressing a larger political injustice.
Singer JJ’s screen presence is a spectacle, giving two performances, one on the song Nathou (a Meitei song)and the second one, Like A Virgin by Madonna, but sung with a Meitei dialect, with the traditional instrument khol. The latterperformance leads to a climax and a revelation about Boong’s father. Boong and Raju seek help from Singer JJ, whose musical performance of Like A Virgin by Madonna (a spectacle for the locals and audience) gathers a lot of people. Boong meets a Burmese girl (Fairy Khoirom) targeting Raju using the catapult (an exposition) in the same manner as Boong, and he notices. He follows her to ask where she learnt it from but finds the cathartic truth about his father’s second marriage, and the Burmese girl happens to be Boong’s stepsister from his father’s second marriage. A truth hard to handle for a child of that age, something shifts within Boong; he weeps and returns to his hometown with Raju and Sudhir.
A Manipuri Lens on Gender and Resilience
Boong meets his mother and lies to her that his father is no more, to which she responds with a question, “Is he fine?” A moving and poignant scene that changes and reveals so much about Mandkini’s character. The story that revolves around Boong and his search for his father shifts the emotional centre of the narrative to Mandikin, her silence, her strength, and her resilience.
Through subtle silences within the everyday domestic existence, the writer creates a figure whose identity is shaped and constrained by the men in her life, and as an audience who focuses more on Boong,
Mandakini, who navigates the social and emotional burdens of single motherhood, has remarkable depth. She embodies the often-unspoken sacrifices imposed upon women within patriarchal structures. Through subtle silences within the everyday domestic existence, the writer creates a figure whose identity is shaped and constrained by the men in her life, and as an audience who focuses more on Boong, with the last scene, the film rewinds, and you shift the focus to Mandakini, who has already accepted her reality but found it hard to inform her son, filled with hope and longing for his father’s return, about the same. Boong burns Madonna’s poster, and the idea of acceptance prevails.
Boong is a simple story with lingering expositions, making you rewind the entire film in your head because of the climax. A screenplay worth discussing in screenwriting pedagogy. The story is about political friendship between a local and a local being called an outsider, a larger discourse on migration and the ‘their’ loyalty to the migrated land (a question that has been popular in India for the past few years), a woman who is prey to the patriarchal structures of the society (many examples can be provided for the same), a tender approach to the idea of longing, a poetic approach to acceptance and moving ahead with reality even though it makes you feel heavy in chest, till your last breath and a story that slaps discrimination by keeping it real and unhinged and an ode to the land to which the writer-director and first Indian film to win a BAFTA, Lakshmipriya Devi, belongs.